First-party data: Transforming Customer Experiences

Baggrund

Søstrene Grene’s online strategy centres on understanding its customers deeply, with a strong principle of never using traditional marketing tactics like discounts and sales. Instead, Søstrene Grene seeks to build lasting, meaningful relationships with customers by delivering hyperpersonalised “experiences like no other” based on first-party data.
When Anna & Clara launched their first website in 2020, the challenge was to translate the vision and the unique, personal shopping experience from the physical stores into a digital context, ensuring a consistent experience whether customers engage with the brand in-store, on the webshop, in the app, in their mailbox or in advertisements.

What makes this even more challenging, is that the sisters renew their assortment up to 300-400 items each week across 110 product categories, equivalent to a staggering 60% of our assortment changing every year. At the same time, we strive to deliver personalised and relevant experiences with product recommendations and suggested personal DIY projects.

So, how do you keep your marketing relevant and personal, when every week, many of your products disappear?
For Anna & Clara, the answer is clever use of first-party data alongside a smart and unique approach to segmentation and hyperpersonalisation across channels.

Given these frequent new product introductions and campaign shifts, the lifespan of our segments is short, typically weekly. This means that the segmentation should not be static but dynamic and evolving, ensuring that all content and product recommendations are personalised and tailored to the customers’ individual needs. That’s one of the reasons why we take a tactically, differentiated approach to segmentation and hyperpersonalisation utilising best practices for each channel.

What does this mean?
For building awareness and attracting new customers through channels outside of our direct control, we relie on the algorithms and best practices of each advertising platform. By fuelling the algorithms with first-party data customer are targeted effectively, utilising the in-platform segmentation capabilities that these platforms offer.

In contrast, when it comes to owned channels and direct marketing efforts, Anna & Clara focus on creating hyperpersonalised customer experiences. This is possible due to its rich wealth of first-party data, which it uses to tailor content and product recommendations to individual preferences and categories in which interest has been shown, enhancing customer retention and encouraging conversions.

Løsning

By combining Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Relewise’s recommendation engine and a newly established in-house AI engine, Søstrene Grene can deliver hyperpersonalised experiences across various customer touchpoints – all driven by first-party data and customer insights. The automation setup enables Søstrene Grene to send out approximately 130 million emails a year across its +15 markets, where almost every email is personalised. By adding the new in-house AI engine, Søstrene Grene can further optimise its 1-to-1 communication based on customer data and enhance personalisation.

Affinity scoring is key in this regard. Every week, the solution analyses data from 300-400 new product alongside customer insights and preferences based on first-party data to create tailored content, product recommendations, automated emails and App push messages for each recipient. It utilises user behaviour, like abandoned searches, along with custom calculations like 'basket openers' and 'product margins,' to enhance revenue potential.

While email marketing and automation marked the first step towards making all digital touchpoints as personalised and relevant as possible, the need to work with first-party data across the entire digital ecosystem quickly became clear. The solution was to empower Søstrene Grene to further activate data through its CDP (mParticle), which integrates all digital platforms handling customer data such as the web shop, app and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. This allows Søstrene Grene to unify all customer data and manage customers as single-user profiles across various digital platforms.

When segmenting, Anna & Clara use an adaptive strategy that leverages algorithms to segment and refine targeting on Meta and Google. These algorithms are enriched by the wealth of first-party data that lies within the sisters’ CDP. Built-in features in mParticle then help identify and utilise the most appropriate marketing channel for each customer. Customer preferences are well-known and stored as data fields for each customer profile, which can be activated accordingly. This strategic use of the CDP empowers us to deploy a sophisticated and responsive marketing strategy that is as dynamic as the customers it serves and enables our marketing team to adapt to the channels used.

To maintain this large-scale personalised outreach, continuously working on lead intake is essential. We collect data from potential leads, using interactive elements like gamification and onsite customer flows. With the strategic focus on continuous lead intake, we have evolved from having only four data points per customer to a comprehensive set of 260 data points per customer in 2023!